We spent the Memorial Day weekend in Manitou Springs with the kids. It was a great weekend - great weather, the kids had a blast, and D and I got to spend time alone today hiking after we dropped the kids off with their dad.
And, as always, I was haunted by the specter of food and my body. As D and I walked though Colorado's beautiful summer woods, I obsessed about how fat I looked and how much I wished I had my old body back.
Am I tired of this? Yes. Am I addressing it? Yes. Is it enough to change my body or my mind? No. And hopefully that just means not yet.
I have been binge free for nearly three weeks. I cannot get too excited about this for two reasons. First, I have not been eating well during that time. Although I have managed to avoid complete food meltdowns, I have eaten too much nearly every day since my last binge. And, second, because I am afraid to think it is a trend and then find myself right back in the midst of a food tornado.
I still do not fit in virtually anything I own, and I spend far too much time loathing my body. I am trying very hard to "eat like a normal person" and, in so far as a normal person does not binge, I am accomplishing this. In the last few days, I have even managed to "eat like a normal person" in the sense of not eating more (or, at least, many more) calories than I need to maintain myself at this weight.
I have set a goal for myself of continuing to hit a caloric goal of somewhere below 1800 cals. I have not set an exact number because that is guaranteed to set off a binge: if I have a goal, and I miss it, I will just decide to screw it and eat all the cookies in the world. I am marking my calendar with a simple check mark if I manage to hit the goal. I am not doing exact tracking (weighing and measuring food, for instance) because, again, that kind of specificity tends to bring out my worst all-or-nothing tendencies. I am doing my best to estimate and erring on the side of higher than lower.
I will also be putting a second check mark on the calendar when I exercise that day. I am nervous about this because, again, my all-or-nothing mentality surrounding exercise means that anything less than sixty minutes of truly sweaty activity is not my definition of exercise, and I don't want to sabotage myself by demanding perfection for the stupid check mark. I just want to move. A walk, a run, a swim, hike, bike ride: I want all of these to count and I do not want to dismiss any of those as not being "worth it" (which, of course, I define by calories burned) and then end up doing nothing.
We will see how this goes.
I have a few things coming up that I would like to enjoy, and that I would enjoy so much more if I was more comfortable with my body. We have a family trip to San Diego (D, me, my kids, his kids, his parents) in the middle of August and I have a high school reunion at the end of September. Of course, I really wanted to have dealt with my body stuff by the wedding and that didn't happen...
Focusing on the positive and not beating myself up is definitely a struggle for me. I am working on it, but most of the time I just want to scream: eat less, move more! It is not rocket science; it is not cancer or civil war or social injustice.
And if that helped, I would look and feel a lot differently.
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